Band Focused Rock Band as an add-on to Rivals? Worth It or not?

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Springsteen obviously has eras and a lot of untapped material, but how many genuine hits? I feel like he'd be better suited to like big DLC pack (back in the RB3 days with keys). Plus his stuff wouldn't have a ton of variety or difficult (but people said the same thing about Green Day so...)

I feel like Bruce has roughly the same amount of genuine hits as Green Day did. High single-digit number of undeniably massive hits, and several more minor hits that are big to fans of the genre or specific artist. Born in the U.S.A. alone had seven top 10 hits, even though only 3 or 4 of those are songs I'd consider big classic rock hits today.

Aside from bands I've seen mentioned, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys definitely have enough hits to support a single-artist game if HMX could get the rights. Journey could support a very attractive setlist, but also you could probably fit the most essential tracks into a 12-pack in a way I don't think you could with The Stones or The Beach Boys.

Holy hell, how did I not think of the Rolling Stones before?! I guess I've just gotten so used to not having them in Rock Band I didn't even consider it. Rolling Stones would be the obvious choice, IMO. Stones and Beatles always went hand in hand.

Springsteen obviously has eras and a lot of untapped material, but how many genuine hits? I feel like he'd be better suited to like big DLC pack (back in the RB3 days with keys). Plus his stuff wouldn't have a ton of variety or difficult (but people said the same thing about Green Day so...)

I feel like Bruce has roughly the same amount of genuine hits as Green Day did. High single-digit number of undeniably massive hits, and several more minor hits that are big to fans of the genre or specific artist. Born in the U.S.A. alone had seven top 10 hits, even though only 3 or 4 of those are songs I'd consider big classic rock hits today.

Aside from bands I've seen mentioned, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys definitely have enough hits to support a single-artist game if HMX could get the rights. Journey could support a very attractive setlist, but also you could probably fit the most essential tracks into a 12-pack in a way I don't think you could with The Stones or The Beach Boys.

Holy hell, how did I not think of the Rolling Stones before?! I guess I've just gotten so used to not having them in Rock Band I didn't even consider it. Rolling Stones would be the obvious choice, IMO. Stones and Beatles always went hand in hand.

Totally agree. The Stones have at least 30 huge hits that immediately come to mind. Fill it up with 10-15 additional deeper cuts, and that's one heck of a game/expansion.

A band like Pink Floyd, I see as more of an albums group. A game for them, with full albums (maybe even the ability to play entire albums at once, like the Abbey Road medley; guys like Waters and Gilmour might appreciate the opportunity to have their albums experienced as a whole) and awesome, trippy, beautiful dreamscapes would be absolutely stunning, but probably a different experience than a Stones game.

Led Zep is probably the closest thing to Stones we have, considering the huge amount of rock classics they have, but considering they're about as far from wanting to do a rhythm game as Floyd, I think the Rolling Stones would be the only possible candidate for a band-centric expansion. At least they've done rhythm games a number of times now, even if they've alluded RB (save for Gimme Shelter).

I mean, we're all dreaming here, as no band-focused expansion would never happen, but...

If it's an expansion and not its own game, it could be a legendary band we already have a lot of, just now we'll have a "story mode" alongside the songs... Queen.

I had that thought, then ended up going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for over an hour, and came up with this: a theoretical "Queen: Rock Band" using only the 28 songs we currently have in RB. Some inaccuracies were necessary (I couldn't find any indication that Tenement Funster and Long Away were ever performed live, and I Want It All definitely wasn't as it was released after they stopped touring), but still.

Nah this'd be a bad idea for the same reason the band games were a bad idea. The Beatles Rock Band is a beautiful game but the formula only works if it's a band literally EVERYONE in your audience likes, which is no one. You're always gonna find somebody that doesn't like it no matter what, check the comments on social media when new DLC gets announced for proof.

That being said, gotta agree with The Rolling Stones being the pick if this did happen. SO many hits. But at that point I don't see why we wouldn't just get Hot Rocks full album DLC and a pack later with the later hits.

It's fun to dream but none of that is happening, not when we're getting 2 songs a week.

Band games were a good idea at the time but only when they exported to the main platform, it was wonderful having GDRB and then just for a small export fee all those songs could be played in other games. To me, TBRB was a worse game because you couldn't play any of the songs in RB2, RB3, etc.

That kind of logic isn't just for band games though, spinoffs in general. Timed exclusivity is understandable (e.g. RB Unplugged) but permanent exclusivity goes completely against the central RB concept of the main series games being a platform. The fact that you can load up RB4 and play DLC/exports from RB1 launch onwards means so much!

The Rolling Stones would make for a great game, because they have so many great songs as has been said, but also cuz those songs cover a lot of different genres in a way: Funk, rock, balads, blues, etc - I love them.I'm all for it - gotta be exportable into the main game though..

Well, given what my avatar is, you can guess who my vote for a Band expansion would be......

Yeah Kiss is lacking in RB.. I don't think they were ever a big "top of the charts" band, but they have quite a few gems missing from the library.. That said - I think they would make for a fun band-focused game more for the theatrics and visuals of it all.

Well, given what my avatar is, you can guess who my vote for a Band expansion would be......

Yeah Kiss is lacking in RB.. I don't think they were ever a big "top of the charts" band, but they have quite a few gems missing from the library.. That said - I think they would make for a fun band-focused game more for the theatrics and visuals of it all.

That's a great point. You could start out in dirty churches and dance halls in New York, then explode on the scene and start selling out stadiums, throw in a fuzzy wobbly screen for the drummer and guitarist mid career that makes playing worth a crap impossible and the drop in popularity to go with it, and then build the empire on the rebound. It could be pretty awesome!

I would end up buying it. I bought RB:GD and I don't like them enough to own an album of theirs but it was a great addition to my/the RB library.

Green Day's game was a great way to get the majority of their discography at the time into Rock Band all at once. Could you imagine if Harmonix tried releasing all of that Green Day content as regular DLC? Hypothetically, if we got American Idiot full album, then a few months later we'd get Dookie, then a few months later the rest of 21st Century Breakdown, etc, people would have been annoyed fast.

Hell, people whined about how often we got Foo Fighters DLC back then. From November 2007 to when GDBRB was announced (December 2009), Foo Fighters had 22 songs as DLC (25 total if you count the songs from RB, RB2, and Lego). That's a little less than half of the content from GDRB.

If you REALLY want to dig into it, Foo Fighters only had one song in the game (Learn to Fly) until RB2 came out with Everlong. There wasn't ANY Foo Fighters DLC at all until The Colour and the Shape album in November 2008. So really between Nov 08 and Nov 09, we got 22 Foo Fighters songs in a year. My point being, Foo Fighters are pretty mainstream and unobjectionable. Green Day isn't quite as popular (plus you have the whole contingency of people that claim they're not really punk, etc).

TL;DR my point is if they dragged out all of that Green Day content DLC across two years or so, I think people would still have been annoyed, moreso than people did with Foo Fighters. Keeping GDRB as a game allowed them to release a ton of content at once, and people that weren't into Green Day could just ignore that game.

The mill has it that Lady Gaga paid off Crapulous to make "Lady Gaga Revenge" for iOS, but I can't verify the rumor - nor can I verify the utility of having more Lady Gaga in RB.

That rumor has got to be 100% false. Why would Lady Gaga pay a music developer to make a game out of her music when she would presumably make more money licensing her music to a developer? In other words, why would Gaga be the one to approach Tapulous and not Tapulous approach Gaga? Tapulous would be the one making money off the game, not her.

That rumor has got to be 100% false. Why would Lady Gaga pay a music developer to make a game out of her music when she would presumably make more money licensing her music to a developer? In other words, why would Gaga be the one to approach Tapulous and not Tapulous approach Gaga? Tapulous would be the one making money off the game, not her.

Good points. I know for a fact that at first, it was Tapulous who approached her, and successfully got two of her tracks (LoveGame and Alejandro, IIRC) as DLC before they launched Gaga Revenge.

It could be that she paid them all the costs of development in exchange for exclusive licensing right on the product, which used the basic TapTap engine but was sold separately.

That rumor has got to be 100% false. Why would Lady Gaga pay a music developer to make a game out of her music when she would presumably make more money licensing her music to a developer? In other words, why would Gaga be the one to approach Tapulous and not Tapulous approach Gaga? Tapulous would be the one making money off the game, not her.

Good points. I know for a fact that at first, it was Tapulous who approached her, and successfully got two of her tracks (LoveGame and Alejandro, IIRC) as DLC before they launched Gaga Revenge.

It could be that she paid them all the costs of development in exchange for exclusive licensing right on the product, which used the basic TapTap engine but was sold separately.